Articles & Case Studies

GPS Brings Water to Scotland’s newest malt distillery

A £40 million investment programme by Diageo has created Scotland’s newest malt distillery, which has included the use of polyethyleneof polyethylene pipes from GPS PE Pipe Systems.

The state-of-the-art distillery has been built at Roseisle, in Speyside near the Moray Firth. It is billed as being Scotland's most environmentally advanced development of its type and will aim to be water and fossil fuel neutral.

As a part of the water recovery plant, GPS pipes will be used to transport heated wash water from Roseisle distillery to the nearby Burghead maltings where heat is recovered via heat exchangers. Cooler water is then pumped back to Roseisle in a continuous process. The water recovery plant will meet 95% of the distiller’s water demand, saving around 300,000 cubic metres of water each year.

Contractor GA Duncan & Sons is performing the installation, which began in July 2009 and is due to be completed in November 2009. They are installing nearly 14km of GPS Excel (PE100) pipe, supplied in four different lengths in SDR11 and SDR17. PE100 was chosen due to its exceptional resistance to corrosion, better flow capacity and associated cost savings, compared to ductile iron pipe or thicker-walled pipes.

Commenting on the project, Joe Duncan from Duncan & Sons said: “This is a very well-publicised project development incorporating state-of-art environmental technology, so it was important that the products installed as part of the project live up to this expectation and offer exceptional performance properties.”

“The quality of GPS pipes speaks for itself, and our overall experience of the system is very positive.”